Travel is a significant expense for any company engaged in international business. Employees travelling for business may spend thousands of dollars during their stay in other countries—on hotels, travel, consumed services, exhibitions, tradeshows and the like. Travel management software market and associated expense-management software market, is worth billions of dollars and only 26% of organizations currently use automated systems to manage travel expenses, since the current solutions are too costly or too cumbersome.
For example, value added tax (VAT) can reach up to 25% of credited expenses, can be reclaimed by companies. But current VAT reclaim is still largely a bureaucratic process involving the filing of multiple forms. It gets more complex since employees travel between different countries, causing the finance department to work simultaneously with many VAT agencies in different countries. A 2013 survey by Quocirca Research showed that 59% of businesses incurred foreign travel and entertainment expenses, leaving 20B in unclaimed business refunds annually. One of the major cited difficulties is dealing with foreign taxes.
Systems for invoice analysis or invoice reading have been a research topic for many years, such as Schulz in ICDAR 2009, titled “Seizing the Treasure: Transferring Layout Knowledge in Invoice Analysis”, Hamza et al in ICCBR 2007, titled “Case-Based Reasoning for Invoice Analysis and Recognition”, Aslan in VISIGRAPH 2016, titled “Use of a graphical part based appearance model (PBM)” and more.
Most modern offices of business entities have to manage on a daily basis a large amount of documents in general, and particularly business documents comprising invoices of goods, services consumed by the business entity and the like. Commonly, invoices are presented as a physical form (paper) requiring a process to transform the invoice into a digital format by scanning or capturing digitally (using a mobile phone, for example). Some invoices are originated in a digital format, yet the associated data needs to be extracted. Thus, these offices are engaged continually with receiving and processing invoices requiring automatic document classification tools aiming at (semi-)automatically classifying the office documents into semantically similar classes.
Invoices usually comprise an invoice layout and may contain a list of charges for the services or products rendered. From a business perspective, invoices require efficient processing for proper financial management of the business entity. Further, value added tax (VAT) management based upon the invoices is crucial for the finance department and for the business traveler.
Business document analysis has been reflected in various patent applications. One such example is described in United States Patent Application No. US 20070168382 A1 titled: “Document analysis for integration of paper records into a searchable electronic database” to Tillberg et al, incorporated herein by reference. The application is associated with electronic extraction of information from fields within documents comprises identifying a document by comparison to a template library, identifying data fields based on size and position, extracting data from the fields, and applying recognition. Another example is described in United States Patent Application No. US 20130318426 A1 titled: “Automated learning of document data fields” to Herve Shu et al, incorporated herein by reference. The application is associated with digital data configured to obtain a first plurality of data items automatically extracted from a first physical document and a validated value for a data field. The method also includes automatically identifying a first linked data item included in the first plurality of data items that is linked to the validated value and setting a physical position included in a rule to the physical position of the first linked data item.
The need remains therefore, for the automatic generation of invoice associated content analysis reports and VAT management for the business traveler and the finance department, based upon invoice images uploaded onto the content analysis platform.
The invention described herein addresses the above-described needs.